Event analysis and post-accident investigations in occupational health and safety

All organizations, whatever their activity, need to analyze the unwanted health events they experience. When it comes to accidents affecting the physical integrity of individuals, organizations have a particularly strong interest in structuring the analysis and investigation process they carry out internally.

First and foremost, employers have a duty to ensure the health and safety of their employees. Any accident will therefore raise the question of the responsibility, or even fault, of the employer and/or its delegates, with potential civil and even criminal consequences. Even if these investigations are carried out by third parties, the organization has a duty to cooperate in clarifying the facts and the causes that led to them.

Even in the absence of immediate legal risks, it is in every organization's interest to ensure that occupational health and safety (OHS) accidents and incidents are analyzed in depth, so as to avoid their recurrence. The analysis of these events is designed to shed light on the failings of the equipment and processes used, the weaknesses of the management systems that support them, and the limitations of the human being as designer and operator of the former and the latter, with the ultimate aim of finding ways to improve occupational health and safety conditions and thus prevent further damage.

Clearly, no organization can be satisfied with a purely "reactive" approach to OHS. Regulations require upstream efforts to identify, assess and prevent risks in the workplace. Unfortunately, the best of systems can fail, and statistics show that even if the overall trend in accidentology is positive, the ultimate goal of "zero accidents" is still some way off.

In this reality, every event, incident, accident or near miss represents an opportunity for learning and improvement, provided it is studied rigorously. Depending on the stakes, risks and opportunities it perceives around OHS, each organization will put more or less resources and energy into exploiting these avenues for progress, but in all cases, method is also required.

This article presents the main tools commonly used to analyze OHS-related events, in an organizational context, leading to the implementation of corrective actions to eliminate the causes of the undesired event, or to find ways of managing them better. Following a description of the tools used in each stage and their sequencing, we will look at the limits and pitfalls commonly encountered by both occasional and seasoned professionals.